Beautiful Error

Kat Finau Explores the Charm of Glitches with these Psychedelic, Conceptual Images

‘Glitches have always had a negative connotation and I always believed that to be wrong,’ graphic designer & photographer Kat Finau told The Plus about her latest project.

The New Zealand based creative has used glitches in a way to challenge concepts of what is beautiful in art, creating Beautiful Error, a 400-page book reacting against the hyperrealism of contemporary Graphic Design.

To create the psychedelic effect, she firstly printed out the images in black and white, and scanned them in whilst dragging them down or across. Once the perfectly imperfect glitches and colours were achieved, she edited them all on Adobe Lightroom.

‘I studied Graphic Design for 3 years and experienced the hyperrealism of it,’ Kat explained. ‘Many university projects were always made to be perfect, no flaws. This made me come up with a concept for a project that focused on mistakes being acceptable within design.’

The Plus: Was it quite straightforward to get your desired effect?
Kat Finau: At first I thought any glitch would look fine but then I found myself scanning the same image at least 8 times just to get the glitch that worked.

TP: What is your general creative process?
KF: When defining a concept I challenge the weak areas, refine the strongest and question everything I do to narrow it all down to one outcome that works. ‘Beautiful Error’ is very conceptual so with this project there was constant experimenting and testing so that the idea behind ‘Beautiful Error’ was obvious.

TP: How would you say that your style has developed as a student?
KF: The themes of my work are turning more conceptual. There is a lot of trial and error to know what works and what doesn’t, but I hope that by the end of 2015 it is far more refined than it is now. I felt like I came out of Graphic Design as a Fine Art student.

TP: What are you working on now/next?
KF: As well as design I also do photography. My main focus in photography is portraiture and its connection with human emotion. I plan to create a body of work for photography and some how reuse and alter the photos to create a different body of work for conceptual visual art. I want to make sure the viewer has a good visual experience and feels something out of the work.